Saturday, June 30, 2012

In Linux Mint Cinnamon, if you are idle for a while, you computer screen
will blank out and the lock screen feature will be activated and you
will have to enter your password to re-access your computer. If you dont
want to enter the password all the time, you can disable the lock
screen feature easily.

To do so in Cinnamon, you can use the familiar tool gconf-editor, but
you will have to install it first. Just open the terminal and run the
following command to install gconf-editor:

sudo apt-get install gconf-editor

Next, hit Alt + F2 and type "gconf-editor":

The configuration window will appear, on which you go to desktop > gnome > lockdown and check the option "disable-lock-screen":

And from now, the computer screen will only blank out when idle without
the lock screen. To re-access the computer, all you need to do then is
to press a key or move the mouse.

Version 0.8.58 of the e-book reader and
management software Calibre was announced on June 29th, with some
important new features and fixes.Calibre 0.8.58 brings some improvements for generated covers and introduces quite a few new drivers for various devices.

Highlights of Calibre 0.8.58:

• Texture for calibre generated covers has been added;• Drivers for Sogo SS-4370, HTC G2 and Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet have been added;• Search to the Manage tags/series/etc. dialogs has been added;• Support for images embedded in the HTML has been added;• A more robust handling of EINTR during IPC has been implemented;• A bug that could cause corrupted output when doing an EPUB/OEB to EPUB conversion has been fixed.• News sources have been improved.

The third milestone release of the Phoronix Test Suite 4.0 (Suldal) has been announced today by Michael Larabel.

Phoronix Test Suite
is the most comprehensive benchmarking and testing platform available
for Linux, and designed to carry out qualitative and quantitative
benchmarks in a clean, reproducible, and easy-to-use manner.

Highlights of Phoronix Test Suite 4.0 Milestone 4:

• Support download caches at /run/media/*/*/download-cache/ has been added;• Set SKIP_TEST_SUPPORT_CHECKS=1 environment variable for debugging purposes to run tests on unsupported platforms;• The software only renders as much room for pts_OverViewGraph as there are for what will be rendered (bar graph values);• DVD drives don't get reported on BSD operating systems when requesting disk drives;• Various alterations have been implemented;• Graphics processor detection on Solaris 11 11/11 for non-NVIDIA GPUs has been improved;• Support for handling i915_energy monitor reading in microJoules for each test run has been added;• A timer support for individual test runs within the module has been implemented.

In this tutorial, we will help you install the original Linux Mint 13
Maya theme and icons on Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin). The credit for
this theme goes here.
To make the installation easier of this theme pack, we have added it to
our custom PPA. Here is a screenshot of this theme under Ubuntu:

To install Mint Maya theme and icons, open the terminal and run these commands:

Mandriva Open Source Relations Manager, Charles Schulz, today tried
to clarify the foundation's vision of structure of community interaction
and resulting products. Instead of explaining, he posted a flow-chart
to illustrate the relationships between downstream and upstream
projects, contributors, and the Mandriva distribution.
Schulz describes the diagram as "an
attempt at describing how the project will work and what it will aim
at. It displays the general logic of contributions, by and for the
community but also integrates what will be external products meant to be
sold by companies that are based on the software development and
packaging done inside the foundation."

As
you can see the still-forming Mandriva community is broken down into
three main contribution sources: Rosa, Mandriva community, and Mandriva
SA employees. All these will contribute to the "Share Cooker"
repository. Several projects are shown pulling code out of the shared
Cooker repo. MIB and Unity base their projects' on Mandriva code and
are shown as pulling from Cooker, but not contributing back.
The
most interesting section is the resulting products. OpenMDV, which one
assumes is going to be the new name for the Open Source community
release, seems to be the main focus. Rosa Linux, who offers a
customized version of Mandriva, will naturally continue to pull from
Cooker. And finally there's a box to symbolize a range of whatever
Mandriva commercial products they may want to base on Cooker.
Schulz
hopes this helps folks makes sense of the Mandriva Linux Foundation,
but there still seems to be some persistent talk of Mandriva SA using
Mageia code for their commercial products.

Clement Lefebvre, father of the Linux Mint project, announced
a few minutes ago, June 29th, that the Release Candidate of the
upcoming Linux Mint 13 Xfce Edition operating system is available for
download and testing.

Being based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin), Linux
Mint 13 RC Xfce is built on top of the Xfce 4.10 desktop environment, it
is powered by Linux kernel 3.2, and distributed as a DVD ISO image for
both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures.

Friday, June 29, 2012

Rockstar has released a video trailer for the Max Payne 3 Local
Justice DLC announced earlier this week, which shows some hot
bullet-on-man action on the three new multiplayer maps included.

Local Justice will also give players the M4 Assault Rifle, a
new Light Fingers Item for faster looting, and a new faction, the São
Paulo Police, when it’s released on July 17.
The pre-order and retail DLC, which includes another new map, will
become available to buy online at the same time, while Rockstar Pass
owners get all the new content for free.
PC Gamer’s official Max Payne 3 review will be up soon. In the
meantime, Tyler Wilde and Evan Lahti break it down in detail in the
latest PC Gamer US Podcast.

Codemasters have released some new ‘work in progress’ screenshots from F1 2012 via their facebook page, as spotted by VG247.
Unsurprisingly, they’re mostly pictures of cars, but this time they
look even more like cars then they did last time! They’re still worth a
look though, because they’re astonishingly pretty. You can almost hear
the vroom sounds.
We thought Codemasters last F1 game was terrific, and you can find out why in our F1 2011 review.

Dota 2′s expansion gathers pace with the arrival of this week’s
second update. This one introduces the heropedia, which presents a
breakdown of every character’s stats, lore background and skills, with
short videos of every ability. You can browse it now on the Dota 2 site, or access it via the “Learn” tab in the Dota 2 client.
The grand roster of heroes has also been expanded with two new
characters, Luna the Moonrider, who’s much more dangerous than she
sounds, and Wisp, a glowing ball of light with some unusual abilities.
Find out more about them, and absorb the latest patch notes below.

Luna The Moonrider

– Moontastic Agility Carry
As titles go, “Luna the Moonrider” isn’t likely to instil much fear,
until you actually see her and notice that she’s riding a giant panther.
Then you’ll notice that the giant panther is wearing a hat, but while
you’re busy noticing that, you’ll be taking a hit to the face from a
rebounding magical chakram. Then as you’re trying to pull your senses
together she’ll be activating her ultimate ability, which turns day to
night and starts zapping you with bolts of searing moon energy. “What the hell, moon!?” you’ll probably cry.
The ability videos in the updated heropedia were done by Dota cinema, who have also done a couple of overview videos for the new heroes. Here’s one for Luna.

Wisp

– Utility Glowing Hero Ball Thing
No Warcraft 3 sprite was left unused in the formation of Defence of
the Ancients. Even glowing balls of light can become characters, as
Guardian Wisp demonstrates. According to his bio, “Wisp occupies all
planes at once, the merest fraction of its being crossing into physical
existence at any one moment,” which sounds grandiose, but it’s best
thought of as a sentient glowing ball who just wants to help. It does
this by tethering itself to heroes, increasing their movement speed and
stunning anyone who touches the strand. For its ultimate trick, it can
teleport to any point on the map for 12 seconds, taking any tethered
hero along for the ride.
See these abilities in action in the Dota Cinema overview of Wisp.

Opting for the digital edition of Diablo 3 will no longer place a
temporary cap on your progress through the game, Blizzard has announced.
Players buying the game on Battle.net post patch 1.0.3 were finding
their characters locked at level 13 and limited to Act I
until their credit cards were verified, a process taking up to 72
hours. With 1.0.3a, this has been fixed – but there are plenty of
restrictions still in place for new buyers.
Unverified digital copies of Diablo 3 will still have restricted
access to the auction house, trade, chat, public games, and they won’t
be able to change their server region. As Blizzard explained last week,
these measures are supposed to combat credit card fraud by making
freshly-purchased accounts less useful as spambots, and therefore less
attractive to unscrupulous types. The full explanation is available on
the Battle.net forums, if you’re interested.
There’s no doubt, though, that it’s an inconvenience. On one hand,
gold selling and associated underhandedness has to be combated somehow –
but on the other hand, isn’t that exactly what the real money auction house was supposed to do?

As noted here yesterday,
Google's new version 4.1 of Android, "Jelly Bean," is a substantial
upgrade of the mobile OS. It's faster, has slick predictive features,
and overhauled user interface components. However, it is worth noting
that just as version 4.1 arrived, Adobe announced that there will be no certified implementations of Flash Player for Android 4.1.
"Beginning August 15th
we will use the configuration settings in the Google Play Store to
limit continued access to Flash Player updates to only those devices
that have Flash Player already installed" says a post from Adobe.
"Devices that do not have Flash Player already installed are
increasingly likely to be incompatible with Flash Player and will no
longer be able to install it from the Google Play Store after August 15th."
Adobe's
partners usually build Flash into their devices, but many users of
Android devices have been accustomed to downloading Flash players for
their devices. Beginning with Android 4.1, Adobe will absolutely limit access to Flash Player via Google Play to devices that already have the program installed.
This may annoy many Android users, but the news isn't a surprise. In November, Adobe said that it would abandon Flash development for mobile browsers. Adobe has also drawn the ire of Linux users for standoffish policies toward the platform.
The
underlying problem is that Flash is a form of Esperanto on the web.
Numerous analyses have determined that approximately 80 percent of the
video housed on the web is Flash-based. Flash is also a platform that
new applications get built around, so limiting its flexibility on
popular platforms ranging from Android to mobile browsers to Linux is
very territorial behavior.
You can read more about Adobe's decision here.

Cinnamon doesn't have an option to
change the notification position on the screen yet, but you can do this
by editing the theme CSS code (cinnamon.css theme file).

Let's change the notifications position. If you're using the default Linux Mint 13 Cinnamon edition theme (Nightlife Graphite), you have to edit the "/usr/share/themes/Nightlife - Graphite/cinnamon/cinnamon.css" file so open a terminal and run the following command:

If you're using the default Cinnamon theme (used by default in LMDE), use the following command instead:

gksu gedit /usr/share/cinnamon/theme/cinnamon.css

For other Cinnamon themes:the cinnamon.css
file path depends on the theme you're using (it's in the "cinnamon"
folder inside the theme directory). To find out the cinnamon.css file
path, open Nautilus and navigate to /usr/share/themes/ - here you'll
find all the available themes -, double click the directory for the
theme you're using you'll find a "cinnamon" folder where there's a
"cinnamon.css" file which is the file you have to edit to change the
notifications position.

Then search for the following code:

margin-from-top-edge-of-screen: 30px;

This is the margin from the top edge of the screen so this value changes the notifications position vertically
- change its value to whatever you want. If, for instance, you want the
notifications to be displayed at the bottom right, you can enter the
value of your screen vertical width minus 100 pixels (example: if you
have a 1920x1080 screen resolution, your screen width is 1080px, so you
would use 980 (1080-100) as the value).

If you want to change the horizontal notifications position, search for:

margin-from-right-edge-of-screen: 20px;

Just like its name says, this is the
margin from the right edge of the screen. Once again, depending on your
screen resolution, change its value to whatever you like.

Once you change the values,
save the file, then open Cinnamon Settings and under Themes, select a
different theme, then switch back to the theme you were using. This
basically applies the changes so you can see the tweaked notifications
in action.

AMD announced yesterday, June 28th, the
immediate availability for download of the AMD Catalyst 12.6 video
driver for Linux operating systems.

As usual, AMD didn't publish any release notes for the ATI Catalyst 12.6 (fglrx 8.98) video driver, but Michael Larabel from Phoronix states that it brings support for application profile, support for Linux kernel 3.4, and various other small bugfixes.

Moreover, AMD Catalyst 12.6 removes support for old graphics cards, such as the R600 and R700 GPUs ( Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000).

AMD Catalyst 12.6 video driver provides production support for the
following Linux-based operating systems: Red Hat Enterprise Linux,
Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux, openSUSE Linux and Ubuntu Linux. It is
available for both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures.